What Are You Doing!

Children have the unique ability to slip into a trance that allows them to do the most dangerous and destructive things on the planet. I speak from personal experience. I can remember, as a child, sawing off the branches of tree in our yard. I simply saw the saw and thought, "hey, I want to saw something" and commenced to sawing. There was no thought of maybe I shouldn't do this, maybe my parents will get mad, or maybe the tree looks fine without sawed branches. I had a saw and the tree was sawable.

When confronted with the what are you doing statement, the only answer to come to mind was "sawing." That inveriably led to, "why are you sawing my tree?" Which to this day the only answer that comes to mind is that it wood. Once explained that I was making the tree look like crap I saw the problem. Yet, with saw in sight, I never once thought about what I was doing or why.

Kids do this stuff a lot. I mean pretty constantly. That is why we have to watch them like hawks. My own daughters have cut their own hair, cut each other's hair, cut the cusion on the couch with a knife, drawn pictures on their walls, hit things with hammers, and so on and so forth. Everytime I catch them in the act the hear the "what are you doing" line or if I am too late, "what did you think you were doing?" I get the same blank stare that I know that I gave in the situation. I see the wheels working in their brain as the realization comes to them, "oh crap, what was I doing?"

I no longer just randomly do things without thinking about the end result. I do however say things and then wonder what I could have been thinking. I may grow out of this, but the number of guys sleeping on couches worldwide on any given night doesn't give me much hope.

3 Responses to “What Are You Doing!”

This is so true. I see it all the time in my daughter. I once told someone who was trying to give Grace a toy, "She isn't interested in it unless it could kill her."I grew up in a rural area and we played in the woods a lot. I remember going out in the woods and looking for dead trees to try and bring down. We never thought for a second that it might be a bad idea. I think we only got one or two trees to fall before my dad found out we were doing it and told us to NEVER do it again.